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Cooperation between the Pentagon and anthropologists a fiasco?

Published on April 16, 2008 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, applied anthropology, ethics, Middle East, University / Academia

The collaboration between the U.S. military and anthropologists has been criticized for both political and ethical reasons. According to a recent article in Newsweek, the whole project could end as a fiasco: The implementation of the $40 million project has fallen short, according to more than a dozen people involved in the program that were interviewed by Newsweek.

Recruitment appears to have been mishandled from the start, with administrators offering positions to even marginally qualified applicants:

Several team members say they were accepted after brief phone interviews and that their language skills were never tested. As a result, instead of top regional experts, the anthropologists sent to Iraq include a Latin America specialist and an authority on Native Americans. One is writing his Ph.D. dissertation on America’s goth, punk and rave subcultures.
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Of 19 Human Terrain members operating in five teams in Iraq, fewer than a handful can be described loosely as Middle East experts, and only three speak Arabic. The rest are social scientists or former GIs who (…) are transposing research skills from their unrelated fields at home.
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Most team members admit they are hampered by an inability to conduct real fieldwork in a war zone. Some complain that the four-month training they underwent in the States was often a waste of time.

Matt Tompkins, who returned home in January after five months in Iraq, said he thought his team provided helpful input to its brigade, but the contribution was more superficial than planners of the program had conceived. “Without the ability to truly immerse yourself in the population, existing knowledge of the culture … is critical,” he said in an e-mail. “Lacking that, we were basically an open-source research cell.”

Actually, language skills and the fact that you have been to Iran to attend academic conferences can make you suspicious – as it was the case with Zenia Helbig, a 31-year-old doctoral student at the University of Virginia with a concentration in Islamic studies and proficiency in both Farsi and Arabic. She had according to Newsweek one of the more impressive résumés of all the recruits.

She says:

“The running joke was that I was clearly a spy and the only question was which country I worked for.”

The articles continues:

The banter turned ugly when, over beers one night, team members began speculating whether the U.S. military would eventually be called on to invade Iran. In the jocular spirit of the moment, Helbig made what she now describes as a careless remark: “I said, ‘OK, if we invade Iran, that’s where I draw the line, hop the border and switch sides’.” In an academic setting, the comment might not have been particularly shocking. Her supervisors settled for a rebuke. But an officer in the program complained to security officials at Fort Leavenworth whose investigation led to her dismissal.

>> read the whole story in Newsweek

According to Wire, “Human Terrain Teams are hopping mad about the Newsweek article” and anthropologist Montgomery McFate, one of the main architects of the human terrain teams, wrote a lengthy response >> read the letter

UPDATE: The American Anthropological Association (AAA) has also responded to the Newsweek article. >> read the letter to the editor on AAAs website

Furthermore, Maximilian Forte has written several related posts recently, see Reviewing the AAA’s Report on Anthropology and the Military and American Anthropologists against Counterinsurgency: Part Two.

Anthropology and CIA: “We need more awareness of the political nature and uses of our work”

Protests against British research council: “Recruits anthropologists for spying on muslims”

Oppose participation in counter-insurgency! Network of Concerned Anthropologists launched

Savage Minds: The Fate of McFate – Anthropology’s Relationship with the Military Revisited

“Tribal Iraq Society” – Anthropologists engaged for US war in Iraq

Military spies invade anthropology conferences?

“Arabs and Muslims should be wary of anthropologists”

San Jose: American Anthropologists Stand Up Against Torture and the Occupation of Iraq and AAA Press Release: Anthropologists weigh in on Iraq, torture at annual meeting

“War on terror”: CIA sponsers anthropologists to gather sensitive information / see also debate on this on Savage Minds

Two Books Explore the Sins of Anthropologists Past and Present

First podcast of the 2008 Society of Applied Anthropology Meeting is online

Published on April 15, 2008 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, applied anthropology, Open Access Anthropology and Knowledge Sharing

“The Art and Science of Applied Anthropology in the 21st Century” is the topic of the first podcast from the annual meeting of the Society of Applied Anthropology.

More podcasts will be published during the following two months. Last year’s podcasts have received much attention.

"The Art and Science of Applied Anthropology in the 21st Century" is the topic of the first podcast from the annual meeting of the Society of Applied Anthropology.

More podcasts will be published during the following two months. Last…

Why the head of IT should be an anthropologist

Published on April 13, 2008 by lorenz Posted in anthropology (general), anthropology in the news, applied anthropology, corporate & business anthropology, design anthropology, internet, media, technology, Us and Them

(via Bits and Bytes) The true value of IT will come not from information or technology per se but from the social side. Therefore anthropologists and other social scientists will become more important to Information Technology (IT) Departments than IT itself, says IT analyst Tom Austin in an interview by Fast Company.

The interview does not deal with user centered design but with shaping a climate of creativity in the workplace in the Web 2.0 era with Facebook, Twitter, blogs, wikis and other online social network tools:

A new species of Information Technologist is emerging from the primordial ooze of Web 2.0 — social scientists and humanists who focus on human behavior more than software code. (…) As computer systems become ever more automated and transparent, attention will shift to how to use these tools as social lubricants in the workplace.

MySpace or Facebook will become models for business interaction, Austin thinks:

Look at teenagers today. They’re teamagers. They work on projects as a group and think nothing of doing it that way. I expect to see that kind of thing percolate through the enterprise as an unstoppable force over the next two decades.

Austin tells about companies that are using websites like Facebook to help reinforce or build a social network inside the company to enhance collaboration and productivity:

They use a variety of tools where employees are encouraged to create a personal page where they share not only name, rank, and serial number but also information about prior jobs, interests, hobbies, other skills they may have, projects they’ve worked on, and so forth. That becomes a dynamic and important tool for navigating through the network of people inside the company to find others who may be able to help you.

In this world of the “ad hocracy” that we live in, where people get thrown into project after project, it helps to look at information and figure out, these three people I’m meeting with tomorrow who I’ve never met before. What are they like? Is there something we share in common — a hobby, a background, education, a boss we hated — that you can use to strike up a conversation?

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The problem with IT today is there are too many engineers and not enough social scientists. Look at the numbers of features and controls we put on how things are done. That’s an engineer’s approach, versus some of the free form approach of Enterprise 2.0 and social networking.

>> read the whole interview at FastCompany.com

There is another business anthropology story in the news: In the article Can the Cellphone Help End Global Poverty?, New York Times author Sara Corbett writes about the work done by Nokia-researcher Jan Chipchase, a “human-behavior researcher” and “user-anthropologist” (but with a degree in design, not anthropology):

His mission, broadly defined, is to peer into the lives of other people, accumulating as much knowledge as possible about human behavior so that he can feed helpful bits of information back to the company — to the squads of designers and technologists and marketing people who may never have set foot in a Vietnamese barbershop but who would appreciate it greatly if that barber someday were to buy a Nokia.

He works in a similar way as many design anthropologists:

Rather than sending someone like Chipchase to Vietnam or India as an emissary for the company — loaded with products and pitch lines, as a marketer might be — the idea is to reverse it, to have Chipchase, a patently good listener, act as an emissary for people like the barber or the shoe-shop owner’s wife, enlightening the company through written reports and PowerPoint presentations on how they live and what they’re likely to need from a cellphone, allowing that to inform its design.

The whole article in The New York Times is interesting but quite long. For a summary including comments see the post over at Neuroanthropology Cellphones Save The World. For more information, see Jan Chipchase’s blog

For an earlier entry on Jan Chipchase, see Capitalism and the problems of “High speed ethnographies”

UPDATE (14.4.08) Anthropologists are part of a research team that wants to find out how mobile phones might be used to allow people to share content with each other >> more information at The Engineer

Plans to study anthropological online communities and Open Access movement

Office Culture – good overview about corporate anthropology in FinancialTimes

Timo Veikkola – The Anthropologist as Future Specialist at Nokia

“The science of ethnography is an ideal tool to designing mobile phones”

(via Bits and Bytes) The true value of IT will come not from information or technology per se but from the social side. Therefore anthropologists and other social scientists will become more important to Information Technology (IT) Departments than IT…

Examples of engaging anthropology – New issue of “Anthropology Matters”

Published on April 3, 2008 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, applied anthropology, Europe, fieldwork / methods, journal articles / papers, youth

How can anthropology contribute to understanding and fighting inequality? The new issue of Anthropology Matters brings together articles from the first British postgraduate MA in Applied Anthropology and Community and Youth Work. Most of the students are experienced youth workers, working with underprivileged, marginalised youth in the UK.

As Alpa Shah writes in her editorial:

All the papers are in some form interested in the lessons from and for anthropological theory and analysis in its engagement with applied action. The articles focus on youth, encourage youth workers to be critically aware of the policy discourses with which they operate, the structural inequalities which they veil, and promote a more reflexive praxis of working with youth in order to create spaces of critical thinking between them.

One example is Saffron Burley’s analysis of the growing trend among young people in urban areas in the UK to own fighting dog breeds such as bull terriers, and the resultant “moral panic” that this has caused among dominant groups. Burley employed participant observation by taking a young Pit Bull Terrier called “Biscuit” out for walks in the area, in order to understand these young people better.

The result, Alpa Shah writes, is “an insightful ethnographic account which explores the subtle potentials that exist in the union of the young person and the dog”:

Burley’s work not only contributes to our understanding of inequality, marginalisation and animal-human relations, but concludes with some lessons for community and youth workers – rather than seeing the dogs as “problems”, as external to the young person, the dog needs to be drawn into the centre of understandings of the dilemmas and tensions faced by youth.

The issue is dedicated to an engaging anthropologist and participant of the MA course at Goldsmith who was killed in a bicycle accident in January: Paul Hendrich. In his phd-project on “Charting a new course for Deptford Town Hall”, Hendrich examines his own institutional context at Goldsmiths College and the debates surrounding the history of the racism of the British slave trade that is embedded in Deptford’s former Town Hall:

As I was putting the finishing touches to this editorial, Paul Hendrich’s wife, Sasha, called with the devastating news that Paul had been run over on his bicycle by a lorry. Paul was 36 years old and had a one year old daughter, Agatha. His death is a deep loss to all of us. Paul was a very special person with some extremely rare qualities. His life was committed to engaging an everyday struggle against racism. He held a passion and belief that anthropology could and should be used for and rethought through this struggle against racism and it is this that guided his engagement with academia.

>> read the whole editorial

>> read Charting a new course for Deptford Town Hall by Paul Hendrich

>> overview over all articles in Anthropology Matters Journal, 2008, Vol 10 (1) Engaging Anthropology

What anthropologists can do about the decline in world food supply

Published on February 18, 2008 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, applied anthropology, food and drink, journal articles / papers, poverty

The UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) warns ominously of an ‘unforeseen and unprecedented’ decline in world food supply. Anthropologists should contribute their expertise and knowledge to this emerging problem, Solomon H. Katz writes in the current issue of Anthropology Today (accessible for subscribers only).

First, anthropologists are often on the ground in remote places in societies which should, but often do not, figure in the mainstream of news stories about food problems. By the nature of our work, anthropologists are often close to the centre of the most desperate problems. We need to report these problems, especially through blogs, wikis and other instant communications within our means.

Second, anthropologists need to communicate beyond our own field about these food problems – with other scientific disciplines, the media, public policy advocates and elected officials who can help implement corrective change. The economic community has begun to focus on the micro level, which is consonant with the anthropologist’s study of problems at the local level.

In the case of food problems, for example, we can share our knowledge of how households, villages and communities are being affected and are coping with the rapidly increasing price of food throughout the world, and we can do so without delay.

Third, anthropologists need to be fully involved in building increased lines of communication that represent their collective perspectives more effectively, and can provide new insights for the media and policy-makers and help change the way societies think and act on problems of global concern.
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Finally, we need to help develop a systematic way for government policy affecting the human food chain to be tested before it is adopted, in order to avoid unintended consequences.

The anthropologist is mentioning an online wiki web page and database of reports from the field as part of a new ‘world food problems’ wiki that he launched in December 2007 at http://wfmo.pbwiki.com Unfortunately, it seems he has taken it down already as it is password protected.

Katz has organized a panel entitled ‘Food to Fuel’ that I organized for the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association in Washington in December 2007.

He writes that the food crisis is the result of the sharp rise in competition between food and fuel, together with the higher costs of energy to produce and transport foods, the increased use of maize as animal feed in China and elsewhere, and the rapid changes in climate and rainfall patterns:

Last winter, within a month of Felipe Calderón taking office as the new president of Mexico, there were so many protests over the rise in corn prices induced by the US corn-to-ethanol policy that Calderón had to reverse his free trade philosophy and immediately fix corn prices or risk further street violence during the opening days of his presidency.

Similarly, the wheat price crisis has sparked street protests in Italy and Russia. In Africa there have been major protests, and the real spectre of food shortages this year resulting from prohibitively high prices looms in at least 37 countries.

UPDATE: The Guardian (26.2.08) reports Feed the world? We are fighting a losing battle, UN admits

Dissertation: Survival in the Rainforest

Global Migrants For Climate Action – Migrants organize to fight climate change

Thesis: How does EU influence the life of farmers in Finland?

Anthropology of Food – one more Open Access Journal!